If you’re looking to win votes or gain public exposure in any way these days, you’ve got to know your audience.
In recent years we’ve seen Jeremy Corbyn hang out with grime artists, Donald Trump meet with Kim and Kanye, and Theresa May, erm, running through fields of wheat in efforts to show they relate.
One politician taking his accessibility further, however, is Joachim B. Olsen, a Danish MP who has taken out advertising space on Pornhub in order to reach more voters.
Olsen is a former Olympic shot putter, and now an MP for the centre-right Liberal Alliance party in Denmark.
In an advert seen on Pornhub’s website, Olsen tells users to ‘vote for Jokke’ (a nickname for Joachim) once they’ve finished using the site’s services.
The politician confirmed it was indeed him on the porn site, writing on Facebook: ‘Yes, it’s me on Pornhub’. He added that the message was intended to be playful, hoping to get people to laugh, but also to get their attention.
Olsen admitted advertising on the site was an unusual place to campaign for voters, but believes it has potential.
Speaking to the Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) on Sunday, May 12, Olsen said, via CNN:
You have to go out everywhere, and then we thought it might be fun to make an ad on Pornhub. Half of the internet is porn. And you have to be where the voters are.
According to the site’s own statistics, Pornhub receives 100 million visits every day, while Denmark is the 28th highest source of traffic for the site, and around 75 per cent of Danish users are male.
Olsen added his campaign is ’95 per cent serious’, but there is room for a ‘fun feature’. The politician also acknowledged the advert had created a degree of outrage among some voters, though he brushed this off as an inevitable consequence.
Many followers on Facebook have generally seen the funny side of Olsen’s advert choice though, as the politician seemingly intended it. While he may have gained a lot of publicity from the marketing tool, I’m not sure many people want to see the face of politician when they’re looking for other kinds of entertainment on the internet.
The Danish general election will be held on June 5.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.